What You’re Paying for Your Child to Learn at College

As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they’re getting for the $20,000 to 50,000 they’ll pay each year.

–The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas, it’s worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically, it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor while discriminating against non-whites.

–There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let’s say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians and Native American storytellers, was “Eurocentrism.”

–God is at best a nonissue, and at worst a foolish and dangerous belief.

–Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.

–Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.

–Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.

–The South votes Republican because it is still racist, and the Republican Party caters to racists.

–Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.

–Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power, and the powerless cannot be racist).

–The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.

—Patriotism: is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.

–War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.

–Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.

–We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.

–Women are victims of men.

–Blacks are victims of whites.

–Latinos are victims of Anglos.

–Muslims are victims of non-Muslims.

–Gays are victims of straights.

–Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.

–There is no objective meaning to a text. Every text means only what the reader perceives it to mean.

–The American dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was an act of racism and a war crime.

–The wealthy have stacked the capitalist system to maintain their power and economic benefits.

–The wealthy Western nations became wealthy by exploiting Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.

–Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is as immoral as defining marriage as the union of a white and a white.

Some conclusions:

If this list is accurate — and that may be ascertained by visiting a college bookstore and seeing what books are assigned to any given instructor — most American parents and/or their child or children are going into debt in order to support an institution that for four years, during the most impressionable years of a person’s life, instills values that are the opposite of those of the parents.

And that is intentional.

As Woodrow Wilson, progressive president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

In 1996, in his commencement address to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College, then-president of the college, James O. Freedman, cited the Wilson quote favorably. And in 2002, in another commencement address, Freedman said that “the purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.”

For Wilson, Freedman and countless other university presidents, the purpose of a college education is to question (actually, reject) one’s father’s values, not to seek truth. Fathers represented traditional American values. The university is there to undermine them.

Still want to go into years of debt?

Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show and is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of four books, most recently “Happiness Is a Serious Problem” (HarperCollins). His website is DennisPrager.com.